


Extraordinary Progress

by quigonejinn



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:31:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17447051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: Luck is on her side.





	Extraordinary Progress

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a nice fic. "Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" is checked for a reason. 
> 
> If you have triggers, **you should assume your triggers appear in this**. 
> 
> If you have things you choose not to read about, **you should assume those things appear in this**.

1\. 

Twelve minutes. 

2\. 

Twenty-eight seconds. 

3\. 

Sound echoes in the stairwell; the fluorescent lights washes out skin, making everyone look sallow. 

"Vanessa, be reasonable," Wilson says, spreading his hands to show he is a reasonable man, that he is not armed, that he means her no harm. He had to duck to get under the door, which was never meant to accommodate a man of his size. The Kingpin is not a man who uses emergency stairways. The Kingpin did not gets his name by _ducking_ , by _bending_ , by making himself fit into smaller spaces -- at least not for anyone other than his wife, even if she is from a parallel universe. "I can give you a good life here." 

"Your guards killed my son."

"Our son. And believe me, every man in that security unit will pay. The man who pulled the trigger is already dead. I killed him with this hand." He shows her his right hand. The palm alone is almost a foot across; his fingers can crack a grown man's skull, and they did, less than half an hour before. "I swear it to you." 

In response, Vanessa lets out a noise that is part sob, part scream, and entirely full of pain. When he moves forward to comfort her, she holds out the gun that she took from a guard. Her hand trembles; the gun cannot hurt him, and Wilson steps closer, hands still spread. 

"Send. Me. Home," she says. 

The gun is still pointed at him, but her entire body shakes now. He is a foot, maybe a foot and a half from being able to spring forward with his superhuman speed and strength, and fold her safely within in his arms.

"This is your home now. With me. A second chance. Isn't that what you wanted?"

There is the tiniest of noises from above, and her head whips upward. She spots the security team that is approaching from above, six strong, in black vests with a grappling hook. Vanessa screams in rage and frustration and fear: there are tears on her cheeks, and she looks in front of her and sees Wilson about to spring. She looks down and sees that they are starting to set up a net, just two floors down, in case she tries to jump.

So she drops the gun.

She throws herself backward, into the stairwell, hoping to fall before they can pulling it across the stairwell. 

Luck is on her side. Although the net is in place directly underneath her, she glitches as she hits the net. In a flash of discordant light and shapes, she somehow phases through the material. In fact, she glitches twice more before hitting the flat cement floor, sixty stories below. 

Doctor Octavius explains that given that Vanessa and Richard Fisk have been dead for years this universe, the bioenergistic constraints are remarkable. 

The fact they managed to keep this one for two days, eight minutes is extraordinary progress. 

4.

Four days, although this time, both Richard and Vanessa glitch into nothingness together from the first half hour. This time, Richard is both old and young enough to sob in his mother's arms between the flashes of existence and nonexistence. Vanessa dies, screaming curses at him in Sicilian learned from her grandmother. 

5\. 

Two weeks, a record that stands. 

6\. 

An hour.

7\. 

Through DNA testing, they know two-thirds of the mass belongs to Vanessa. One third of the mass belongs to Richard. As best they can tell, it is still alive, still functioning, still responding to light and capable of sensation. Basic bodily processes are being sustained with some medical help, and the conglomeration even appears to be more stable than expected, glitching significantly less than other iterations at this point in the transport cycle. 

But something went wrong at the moment the universes came together. Two bodies combined into one, and now, there are more eyes than there should be, and they look out from places where there should be none. Organs pulse under thick, wet membranes. A woman's hand wears a wedding ring, and rhythmically clenches open and closed in the crook of an elbow. They bring in an expert on sign languages, someone who translates for the United Nations and owes someone who owes Wilson Fisk a great deal of money. She says that the hand is not making any code or set of signals she can recognize. Then, she spends the next half-hour vomiting noisily into a corner. 

A child's mouth struggles to breathe in the middle of a torso. 

After three days, Fisk tells Octavius to put it out of its misery. 

5\. 

A single figure appears in the arrival area. Female, impossibly young, wearing ragged clothes, and Fisk is about to assume that a mistake has occurred when he sees her put a hand underneath her heavy stomach. He remembers that gesture, that grace from when Vanessa was in the last trimester with Richard, and he realizes that this is Vanessa, much younger than he ever knew her. 

How old is she? 

Fifteen. 

Who is the father of her child? What happened? 

She looks at him, eyes dark and wide. Who would touch her once Wilson Fisk made it known? 

Fisk breathes out, not wanting to believe that his parallel self could do this to a girl like this, a child. But he does believe it. She tells him about a dark universe, a world of hunger and deprivation and societal breakdown. When he reaches his hand to touch her, she flinches, then forces herself not to flinch. Wilson Fisk notices that. He notices, too, how thin her arms are. How sharp the bones in her shoulders. The way she looks at food. The way she gasps when he pours the rest of a cup of water down a drain. 

He curses that other universe in general, and himself in that other universe in particular. He vows that he will give this Vanessa everything her heart desires. She will have all she wants. He will not lay a finger on her. 

A week and two days later, she is still stable. Only a handful of glitches. Wilson Fisk wakes from a deep sleep in a penthouse apartment, adjoining his but entirely separate and furnished solely for her -- to celebrate the obstetrician from Teill-Cornell confirming that the fetus inside her is male and healthy and developmentally normal and that she was doing well too, they had dinner together, and talked for hours. He fell asleep with his head in her lap, being careful not to crush her with his wait. Her small right hand rested on his shoulder, and she listened to him talk about his day. Nothing particular: only generalities. 

In return, she told him about small dreams she had. Leaving the building. Seeing rain, which he had told her about. 

Holding her child in a few months time. 

"What should I name him?" 

"Richard," he said, with his face turned up to her. 

Her fingers were light against his cheek. "Was that the name of your son?"

He nodded, and kept his eyes on her face. "It'll be the name of our son," he said. 

Now, Fisk walks through the penthouse, calling her name. She is not in the kitchen. She is not in the dining room. She is not in the media room, or on the rooftop terrace that she delighted in, because she had never seen a version of New York, fully populated and untouched by the apocalypse. 

She is not in her bedroom. She is not in the dressing room set aside for her and filled with beautiful clothes and shoes and jewelry, or the beautiful marble bathroom adjoining it. She is not in the spare, empty dressing room or bathroom adjoining that: if it continued to go well for another few days, Fisk was going to ask if he might start to keep a few items in there for his use. 

Fisk finds her in the attached housekeeper's suite, a small, cramped set of rooms with a Formica-topped bathroom. She ran a warm bath, then slit her wrists with a stolen razor and lay down in the tub, her and her unborn child, rather than be trapped in another universe, however luxurious, with him. 

6\. 

They are on the floor together. 

"Mommy come back?" 

"Soon, little one." 

Richard has come through relatively stable. Two and a half years old, just starting to put words into sentences. He recognizes his father. Is comforted by his father, who looks and smells and sounds familiar. His mother is in another room; she was initially glitching every thirty seconds and frightening Richard, so Fisk had her taken away. Now, she is glitching every ten seconds, five seconds, two seconds. The walls are thick and padded, and keep sounds out well: they have learned that when the glitching reaches that frequency, it is invariably agonizing. 

Fisk runs his hand over his son's hair, soft and fine. 

Richard swings his feet. He asks where his trains are: they don't keep toy train sets in Fisk Tower, so an assistant runs out to buy one. 

By the time she returns, Richard has started to glitch. He screams. He doesn't understand why it hurts so much. He asks his father to make it stop. 

Does Fisk stop? 

7.

Nine hours. 

8\. 

Twenty-six hours. 

9.

The woman is tall and dark-haired, in her mid-forties. There is even a white streak in her hair, although on the other side. When he steps into the room, she looks up, and the face is familiar, too: expensive and well-kept, but with small signs of age. The video footage had shown her crying, and even after she had been searched for weapons and had taken a shower and changed into the new clothes provided and eaten the meal provided, she still seemed frightened. Uncertain. 

But now that she sees him, her whole face changes. Her mouth falls open. Her eyes go wide.

"Wilson?" she asks, hesitating.

"Yes," he says, finding himself smiling a little in response. Even after all these times, it still touches him. 

"You're alive," she breathes. "How can you be -- you were -- "

She puts an hand out on the wall to steady herself, and he steps forward, still smiling, ready to support her.

And then -- 

He looks down, but can't quite manage to say anything. 

"You're not the only one who knows about multiple universes," she says, smiling. The tone of her voice is entirely different, and she starts to pull the blade out of him. It seems to go on forever. Wilson realizes, with clarity, that despite his great size, he has been entirely run through with force and precision and skill. There is pain, but at a great distance, and as she pulls the blade out of him, it shrinks and partially stays a blade, partially shifts back into being her arm. With surprising strength, she rolls him face down onto the ground. He can feel the edge of the blade pressing against the back of his neck, where it meets his skull. It's his most vulnerable point, one of the few places where a second blow would be able to kill him. 

He tries to move his arms. He tries to move his legs. To keep him still, she sets a slim, bare foot on his head. Her foot is stained with the blood pouring out of him; the edges of his vision are filling with blood. 

In her universe, Kingpin is a title, not a name. How do you think she earned it? 

Then, when she ran out of universe to conquer, she went looking. She did her homework. 

As a result, in this universe, Wilson Fisk dies listening to his wife introduce herself to Doctor Octavius, and Doctor Octavius responding with warm, genuine curiosity about how she fooled the genetic scans that prioritized universes with both Vanessa and Richard.


End file.
